Likud Minister: ‘Annex Yesha as Proper Answer to Abbas’ UN Ploy'

Answer Abbas' breaking the Oslo Accords and going to the UN for recognition by beating him to the punch: Annex Yesha, says Likud MK.

By Tzvi Ben Gedalyahu

First Publish: 11/14/2012, 8:42 AM

Minister Gilad Erdan

Israel news photo: Flash 90

Israel should annex Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria as a response to Abbas’ appeal to the United Nations for recognition, Environment Minister Gilad Erdan of the Likud told Voice of Israel public radio Wednesday.

Canceling the Oslo Accords, as the government has suggested, is not enough, Eldad said. “Finally, Jews in Judea and Samaria can live like normal citizens,” he declared. Erdan added that Israel should stop transferring to the Palestinian Authority monthly tax revenues it collects on its behalf.

Erdan said he is not concerned with probable American opposition to annexing Judea and Samaria as Israel did more than 30 years ago to establish sovereignty over all of Jerusalem and the Golan Heights. Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria still are under military authority, a situation that does not afford Jews there equal status with the rest of Israeli citizens.

PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas has balked at President Barack Obama’s request to withdrawal his request to the UN General Assembly to grant the PA Non-Member Observer status by passing a resolution acknowledging all of the its territorial demands.

President Obama has insisted that negotiations with Israel are necessary for establishing a new Arab state within Israel's current borders. Abbas has argued that winning UN approval would pressure Israel to come to the table under his conditions, which in effect are to forfeit negotiations and agree to the PA's political demands.

The Palestinian Authority has the needed guaranteed majority in the General Assembly, but the Arab League has not explicitly given its support, a factor that could cause many pro-PA countries to abstain in the vote. Abbas wants the resolution to be introduced and passed on November 29, the anniversary of the United Nations’ 1947 partition plan that declared that a new country of Trans-Jordan and Israel would divide the land that was under the British Mandate.

The plan granted Israel a small area, but Arab refusal to accept the idea of a Jewish state evolved into a war aimed at destroying the new State of Israel, declared in May 1948. The war ended in 1949 with acceptance of Temporary Armistice Lines, which existed until the Six-Day War in 1967, when Arab armies fled from the Golan Heights, all of Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria.